A Dream Come True

When mom was young she wanted to be a nurse. Her parents wouldn’t let her because it was not proper. It is hard for me to understand. My grandmother was a midwife, but she was not attending to naked men. So mother was a teacher for a short time and then she married at eighteen.
Mother was a stay at home mom until she was forty five years old. She worked at a grocery store in the butcher shop. She hated that job because she was always cold. When we moved to the second house in town, she applied for a psychiatric aide and got the job. It entailed caring for mentally ill people in the Cherokee Mental Health Institute.
She seemed to enjoy her job. We had my grandmother and grandfather living with us. It gave her a break away from seeing to their needs constantly. She often said that if it wasn’t for her job, they would have had to go to the nursing home. She had her cousin, Margaret, care for them while she was at work.
Mom and Dad moved to South Sioux City, Nebraska after Mom’s parents died. Dad started working at a newspaper there. Mother decided this was her chance to do something for herself. She enrolled in a Technical School and studied Practical Nursing. She was fifty five years old when she finished school. She was so happy. At that time my sister was a Registered Nurse.
Mother needed a job. There were jobs aplenty for licensed practical nurses.. She went to work for a small hospital in Sioux City, then she changed jobs and worked in a nursing home. She enjoyed that job, however, she was so hands on that she caught everything that the residents caught. She would cradle their heads when she gave them their medicine and it seemed that she was sick all the time.
One day my sister called me and asked me to come home. My mother was sick and needed me to care for her. When I arrived at my mother’s home, she was already in the hospital. She was so sick she was in intensive care. Her kidneys had quit working and her vital signs were failing. The doctors did not know what was wrong. I prayed at my mother’s bedside and within a few hours, her vital signs started to improve. After a spinal tap and many tests the diagnosis was Gilliam’s Beret Syndrome. My mother’s recovery was slow. She was in the hospital for several days. I went home with her until I felt she was able to care for herself. The side effects of this disease stayed with her the rest of her life.
My mother and I were visiting when she came home and I told her I did not want her to work anymore. She laughed, because I was so stern, but she did not return to work.